The Autodesk team revealed Bifrost — their new visual programming environment in Maya.
The Autodesk team revealed Bifrost — their new visual programming environment in Maya. The project lets users create custom effects, publish, and share them with other artists to use across different shots, scenes, and shows. The release comes with a ton of pre-built graphs to help users get started creating effects like dust storms, fire, snow, and sand super.
“This project has been a labor of love for my team, but it wouldn’t be what it is today without the dedicated support of our band of beta users. I’d like to give a huge shout out and thank you to all of you – Without your help, this would have been a very different release,” noted Autodesk’s Marcus Nordenstam.
Using the Bifrost Graph Editor, users can set up visual programming graphs to do scattering, instancing, deformation, volume processing, dynamic simulation, material assignments, file IO, and mix in low-level math nodes.
It also features new physically-based solvers for aerodynamics and combustion that allow creating deceptively natural-looking smoke, fire, and explosions. “Simple artistic controls make it easy to adjust boundary conditions for your effects so that they interact in a more physically-accurate way with the surrounding scene,” noted the developer. Users can set up adaptivity to automatically add or remove detail depending on characteristics like velocity, turbulence, and smoke density.
You can learn more about the tool here.